Is it Vietnam or Viet Nam?

Mimi, I actually don’t know. Is it one word or two in your country?

Nam.

Vietnam is the only spelling I know. I have lived all my life in the US.

But these things can change quickly. When I was a kid, Americans called the capital of China “Peking”. In the 1980s we all moved to “Beijing”.

There doesn’t seem to be a consensus. Either seems to work. https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/25642/preferred-or-correct-english-spelling-vietnam-or-viet-nam

When I did a search for Vietnam on Google maps, these were the results:

Vietnam
Việt Nam

I’m sure the OP knows more about the bottom spelling than I do. ;)

@snowberry it’s the second word in @Brian1946‘s answer.

@Mimishu1995

What time is it there?
It’s 2:41 AM here.

5:46 p.m here :)

@Zaku interesting. So it seems like everything changed once we started to get more involved in the international politics. I did notice that by the time I graduated.

I’ve only seen Vietnam, and some people use Nam for short verbally, especially when talking about the war.

If you are saying that the second spelling @Brian1946 wrote is more correct, then maybe there is an attempt in English to be closer to the Vietnamese usage? Lately, in the US, I’ve seen that more than once. They changed the spelling and pronunciation of Kyiv, they changed Sichuan, also words like Muslim, now maybe your country too?

I only knew the name as Viet Nam for most of my life, but I just noticed that my iPad corrected it to “Vietnam”.

@Mimishu1995 If I were a citizen of your country, I’d prefer to see it spelled close to how I write it in my own language, and in English that would be VIet Nam. But there’s only ever been one way to write this: Vietnamese, which of course is one word. What’s your opinion? How do you deal with this there?

I’ve seen it both ways but my jacket from the war period has two words.

@JLeslie I’m pretty sure that Kyiv is the correct spelling, although that may have been what you were getting at. The old spelling, Kiev, was a Russian construct.

@JLeslie and @LifeQuestioner: The Romanized alphabet spelling of these things is just interpretation. “Kyiv” is just an adaptation of the Cyrillic,
And written Vietnamese: ” Vietnamese is a tonal language, written today with a Romanized alphabet (i.e., the same alphabet used for English or Latin) called Quốc Ngữ (which means “national language”), where diacritics indicate both tone and vowel sounds.”

From thos: https://asianstudies.unc.edu/vietnamese/

Vietnam is the most commonly used spelling in English, though some agencies like the UN regard Viet Nam as the only correct spelling. Viet Nam, Viet-Nam, and Vietnam all seem to have been in use since the 19th century, with the hyphenated form eventually falling out of usage in favor of the other two. Neither one is more correct than the other in contemporary English, though Viet Nam is more accurate to the native spelling, and this may be driving a shift toward its preference. That said, as @snowberry points out, the single-word spelling gave rise to the demonym and name of the language. Viet Namese is simply awkward and violates English morphological rules.

Place name spellings may change as a result of government preferences, language shifts, or an attempt to cast off colonial names. Beijing, for example, reflects the modern standard Mandarin pronunciation and Romanization of the name and replaced earlier Peking, whose spelling reflects the Nanking dialect of Mandarin encountered by European traders (though Peking has been fossilized in certain noun phrases, like Peking duck).

Kyiv is a direct Romanization of the Ukrainian name of the city. Formerly, the Russian name of the city, Kiev, was the preferred source of the Romanization in English. Note also the pronunciation shift toward “keev” rather than disyllabic “kee-ev”. Neither one is particularly accurate to the native pronunciation, though.

When I was stationed over there it seemed to me that the two versions were interchangeable, and it was pronounced ”Vi’-et NAHM”. Most servicemen (and women) would shorten it to ” ‘Nam”.
When I returned home to the US, I naively enrolled in a mail-order broadcast school, where I learned the phrase “News fron Vietnam” should be pronounced ”Nyooz from VYET-nahm”.

I adapted that pronunciation from a short time, but my peers and fellow veterans pronounced it per the former…so I eventually reverted without giving it much thought, usually just saying referring to the country as ‘Nam.

Now when I see the name it’s usually as one word, Vietnam.

@LifeQuestioner Kyiv is the newer spelling being used in the US. I have no idea when it changed. I grew up with the city pronounce Kee-ev. Now, it’s closer to how Ukrainians pronounce it, Kiiv.

@JLeslie I just thought that it had something to do with the older version from when the USSR was still around. I have a friend in Ukraine who insists on the correct newer version being used, just like saying Ukraine instead of the Ukraine.

@LifeQuestioner That might be why, I have no idea. If the people from Ukraine feel strongly about it, I think it should be changed.

I personally don’t think the spelling is a very big deal, but it’s not my country. I’m in a Yiddish facebook group and people spell Yiddish and Hebrew words five different ways on one thread. It’s totally normal to us. It’s also not upsetting to us. When it’s a language that doesn’t use our alphabet, words are written phonetically and I guess with Kyiv that was the main point, to get closer to the pronunciation in the home country. English speakers have a hard time saying it correctly anyway.

@JLeslie I’m still trying to train my voice to text to spell it right, even when I know that I’m pronouncing it correctly. I tell my phone it must be Russian! :-D

Our Ukrainian jelly told me around the time the war started that most Americans say it incorrectly.

Seems like the answer to this is more complicated than I thought :D

@snowberry that is the problem with one language moving to another. It seems like a lot of older Vietnamese can’t pronounce “w” so a lot of English names with w are omitted when transcribed into Vietnamese. The name William would be “uy-li-am”. That is just one example of how words getting transformed in another language.

Googling for this question, I think I find that Vietnam uses the Roman alphabet. Is that correct?

Cut and pasted from Wikipedia. I see the official name is now SRV – Socialist Republic of Vietnam:

The name Việt Nam (Vietnamese pronunciation: [viə̀t naːm], chữ Hán: 越南), literally “Viet South”, means “Viet of the South” per Vietnamese word order or “South of the Viet” per Classical Chinese word order.[12] A variation of the name, Nanyue (or Nam Việt, 南越), was first documented in the 2nd century BC.[13] The term “Việt” (Yue) (Chinese: 越; pinyin: Yuè; Cantonese Yale: Yuht; Wade–Giles: Yüeh4; Vietnamese: Việt) in Early Middle Chinese was first written using the logograph ”戉” for an axe (a homophone), in oracle bone and bronze inscriptions of the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200 BC), and later as ”越”.[14] At that time it referred to a people or chieftain to the northwest of the Shang.[15] In the early 8th century BC, a tribe on the middle Yangtze were called the Yangyue, a term later used for peoples further south.[15] Between the 7th and 4th centuries BC Yue/Việt referred to the State of Yue in the lower Yangtze basin and its people.[14][15] From the 3rd century BC the term was used for the non-Chinese populations of southern China and northern Vietnam, with particular ethnic groups called Minyue, Ouyue, Luoyue (Vietnamese: Lạc Việt), etc., collectively called the Baiyue (Bách Việt, Chinese: 百越; pinyin: Bǎiyuè; Cantonese Yale: Baak Yuet; Vietnamese: Bách Việt; “Hundred Yue/Viet”).[14][15][16] The term Baiyue/Bách Việt first appeared in the book Lüshi Chunqiu compiled around 239 BC.[17] By the 17th and 18th centuries AD, educated Vietnamese apparently referred to themselves as nguoi Viet (Viet people) or nguoi nam (southern people).[18]

The form Việt Nam (越南) is first recorded in the 16th-century oracular poem Sấm Trạng Trình. The name has also been found on 12 steles carved in the 16th and 17th centuries, including one at Bao Lam Pagoda in Hải Phòng that dates to 1558.[19] In 1802, Nguyễn Phúc Ánh (who later became Emperor Gia Long) established the Nguyễn dynasty. In the second year of his rule, he asked the Jiaqing Emperor of the Qing dynasty to confer on him the title ‘King of Nam Việt / Nanyue’ (南越 in Chinese character) after seizing power in Annam. The Emperor refused because the name was related to Zhao Tuo’s Nanyue, which included the regions of Guangxi and Guangdong in southern China. The Qing Emperor, therefore, decided to call the area “Việt Nam” instead,[d][21] meaning “South of the Viet” per Classical Chinese word order but the Vietnamese understood it as “Viet of the South” per Vietnamese word order.[12] Between 1804 and 1813, the name Vietnam was used officially by Emperor Gia Long.[d] It was revived in the early 20th century in Phan Bội Châu’s History of the Loss of Vietnam, and later by the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDĐ).[22] The country was usually called Annam until 1945, when the imperial government in Huế adopted Việt Nam.[23]

I wonder if these countries send out a bulletin to the English speaking media, like to AP, to notify them that they prefer a different name or spelling.

Take for instance Germany. In German it is Deutschland. In Spanish it is Alemania. Three very different words.

Sweden in Swedish is Sverige (I think?) and in Spanish it is Suecia.

Italy is Italia in Italian. English speakers could easily pronounce the Italian word. Venice is Venezia.

@jca2 Interesting info.

Sweden is Ruotsi in Finnish, and Germany is Nemecko in Czech. These are exonyms (terms for a place used outside that place by foreigners in their languages) vs. endonyms (terms used within that place by its inhabitants in their own language).

@Demosthenes Yes, but with Kyiv it seems like they are trying to get English speakers closer to what native speakers use. I was just wondering who decides.

Well, who’s “they” in that sentence? ;) I would say the current Ukrainian government is attempting to change the English exonym for the city, as are people who are sympathetic to Ukraine and critical of Russia.

@Call_Me_Jay yes, we use Roman alphabet. But it is just to transcribe what our language really is, a Chinese-like language that doesn’t adhere to Latin language rules. That is why our words are separated.

And that’s also why the Vietnamese language has so many diacritical marks. Most languages that use the Latin alphabet are not as tonal as Vietnamese, so the diacritical marks are needed, for example, to differentiate between the six variations of the vowels. That’s why, for example, the word for the popular noodle soup, phở, is pronounced ”fuh”.